Well written. One thing that I keep thinking is that even if you know the law, there's still a lot of applications where its use is unobvious. For instance, yo

Well written. One thing that I keep thinking is that even if you know the law, there's still a lot of applications where its use is unobvious. For instance, you might be satisfied you know how a pendulum works. Now put another pendulum on it. Or you think you understand gravity, because you got taught the inverse square law. And you then get Kepler's laws. But then with three bodies, things get really hairy. Or you understand statics and materials. But how do we shove that into finite elements? Not an obvious thing, and required some real investigation. There's also completely new ways of seeing things. Who would come up with information theory? Doesn't seem like something that would obviously be found, despite not really requiring any physical experiment. And then there's things like algorithm research that turn out to be really big once there's a bit of computational power on the horizon. (Probably people think about the algo before they can try it on a machine.)